Microsoft's Bing search engine has a long way to go to dethrone Google and while this will not happen overnight, by pushing out updates at a consistent rate, the company is finding new ways to compete with the juggernaut. To build on its feature set, Bing has been pushing out a plethora of updates over the past year for both consumers and developers.

One of the consumer friendly updates is making downloads a bit safer with a new feature that extracts vital information when searching for an app. In the image you see at the top of this page, if you are trying to download Audacity, the card on the right side of the page has relevant information about where you can download the program, similar applications and other vital bits like platform support and the official site.

Besides making it easier to find downloads, safely, Microsoft has also advanced search queries for developers easier. They have done this by streamlining the API and code search reference queries. As you can see in the example below, Bing was able to extract relevant information from dotnetperls.com and display it in the search results. This extraction of data can save you a click or let you know the types of content that will be available once you do click the link. Bing also has the ability to understand queries containing non-alphanumeric characters too.

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These are a couple of features that Microsoft has brought to Bing to try and target specific queries and make them more useful for both developers and consumers.

Sure, these may not be revolutionary features and they may only affect a small set of searches but when you keep adding these types of features to a platform, they do add up over time to make the overall search experience better.